Lance Rogers, a legal editor for Bloomberg BNA, discusses why The Arizona Supreme Court just ruled that a man didn’t lose his expectation of privacy in a smart phone just because he failed to protect it with a passcode and left it unattended in a room full of police officers and others.

Emails of the Democratic National Committee were leaked this summer. Last year, a Chinese hack of the US Office of Personnel Management exposed the personal data of millions of Americans. So, how safe is the ballot box? Cybersecurity expert Dr. Richard Forno, Assistant Director of the UMBC Center for Cybersecurity, walks us through the potential vulnerabilities of voting systems in America.

What kind of surveillance assistance can the U.S. government force companies to provide? This issue has entered the public consciousness due to the FBI's demand in February that Apple write software to help it access the San Bernardino shooter's encrypted iPhone. Technical assistance orders can go beyond the usual government requests for user data, requiring a company to actively participate in the government's monitoring of the targeted user(s).

Andrea Matwyshyn, a professor at Northeastern University Law School, and David Greene, Civil Liberties director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, discuss Twitter’s Wednesday victory after a federal judge ruled that the social media platform cannot be held responsible for the Islamic State’s use of the network to spread propaganda.

The ABA Annual Conference may not have been a lot of fun for, say, an institution on the cusp of a DOE smackdown, but as a member of the press — marked with a bright yellow badge in case (and the “yellow journalism” epithet did not go unnoticed) — it’s a pretty good time. With my friends from the LegalTalk Network, producers of Thinking Like A Lawyer, I had the opportunity to chat with experts as they finished their panel discussions.

With recent hacking issues, some wonder how vulnerable computer systems will be during the U.S. election and what security measures are in place to deal with any potential threats. Also, a new study finds that sexualization of women in video games is decreasing. And, virtual reality is being taken more seriously by the U.S. government, as a panel met on Capitol Hill last week to discuss the potential uses of the technology.

On July 23rd, CPJ Staff Technologist Tom Lowenthal gave a presentation as part of the HOPE XI hacker conference at the Hotel Pennsylvania in New York City. Tom's talk, entitled “Won’t Somebody Please Think of the Journalists‽” described the challenges of protecting journalists in a world where journalism is no longer conducted only by professionals. Tom exhorted the technologists and developers in attendance to build tools which account for the distinctive needs of journalism and which protect their users when they are engaged in acts of journalism.

Many of America’s top cybersecurity executives are gathering in Las Vegas this week for an annual conference known as Black Hat 2016. Organizers say hacking remains a major concern and that many of the country’s digital infrastructure is vulnerable, as demonstrated by a series of recent high-profile attacks on consumer companies and political organizations. So what can be done to keep information safe? On this week’s HashtagVOA, we ask a few experts for answers.

Hours after gunman Micah Johnson ambushed police officers in downtown Dallas, he was killed by a bomb strapped on a police robot. Robots in the past have stopped a lot of dangerous situations, but using a robot to kill - that was a first for a domestic police force. Kris Van Cleave reports on the ethical questions about the use of robots to kill suspects.